Body is wiser than Ego.
Ego is cleverer than Body.
When Ego catches Body’s tune, a song happens.
When Ego catches Body’s intuition, magic happens.
An idea is born.

When we focus with our hearts on troubling questions, our unconscious comes through for us. Open questions posed to the unconscious act as the strange attractors of chaos theory. They enable the creative speech of discovery.

In this book, you will explore how your ego rises from your body through language. You will appreciate how the creative thinking enabled by body–ego interplay builds your personality overtime. The personal and social realms you create have remarkable properties. When you understand those properties, you open new vistas for viewing empathy, visions, hallucinations, dreams, and the reality of language. You open new ways to understand objective reality, the reality of religious myths, and even the reality of death.

The motif of most Western thought since the time of Zoroaster and Plato is that we are minds (and souls) trapped within physical bodies. St Augustine reinforced this tradition and Descartes formalized it. The upright man, as symbolized by the stick figure (all head and almost no body) became a standard Western conception.

Nietzsche saw the evil of this conception and protested it loudly. Merleau-Ponty demonstrated that our bodies both know and are known. Freud and Lacan showed how the ego rises from the body through the magic of language. Our bodies are microcosms of the universe and bearers of its unspoken secrets. Holograms, chaos theory, and fractal geometry bear witness.

For more about this book and its blog, go to
www.bodywisdombook.com

A few slides to layout the principle of different feedback loops between your online community, your site, contributors, readers and other blogs and communities. Any feedback?

…And thanks to tweet-feedback from Jenny Ambrozek (@sagenet) for the wider context around the power of feedback loops – see the Fast Company article on how Ning is using this concept (what they term a ‘viral expansion loop’) to great effect. [I'm currently at the British Computer Society at Covent Garden, so looks like I'll be reading the print-out over lunch].

PS: It’s also a key way in which the world’s biggest social network site Facebook, by implementing the ‘status update’ feature, managed to rapidly grow its membership, as I outlined in a recent post. In other words this is a very powerful tool if done well, and with something people want. Anyone want my viral loop consultancy better get in touch quick as I’m off to see a London-based social media agency about this on Thursday!

In the meantime I’ve ordered Adam Penenberg’s book ‘Viral Loop’ (see the Amazon widget on my homepage to order a copy) after a ‘winning streak’ of blog posts on the power of networks & feedback loops led me to his virtual door. If you fancy creating some feedback loops, or plain user flows for that matter, I’ve tracked down what appears to be a useful site: Product Planner. It allows you to create your own viral loops and check out some that have already been created.

And of course I did a very quick search today on Twitter on the key phrase ‘viral loops’ which unearthed this gem of a slideshow, from Josh Jeffreys (Interactive Creative Director at BusyEvent) which provides (in his words) an overview of how to build applications that have built-in mechanisms for driving users to recruit additional users through normal use of the application. Look out for the new acronym ‘UDU’ (users drive users):Viral Loops: Making Self-Marketing Apps

Wayne Gretzky-Style ‘Field Sense’ May Be Teachable http://shar.es/m3E8W An application to social networking influence is my thought. Cheers!

My tweet today (above) follows my last blog post on the importance of location, rather than the number of connections, in determining an individual’s influence: “we may have got too focused on valuing networks in terms of who is the best connected. In fact the most influential person in the network comes down to location, rather than connections,” according to the research paper ‘Identifying Influential Spreaders in Complex Networks’.

In other words if location is important, and if networks are dynamic, then maybe you can get better at being in the right place at the right time to maximise your influence? Perhaps the sports science of ‘field sense’ has something to offer here to online social networking strategy? It’s just a hunch for now.

A recent research paper suggests we may have got too focused on valuing networks in terms of who is the best connected. In fact the most influential person in the network comes down to location, rather than connections, as outlined in this blog extract:

The importance of hubs may have been overstated, say Kitsak and pals. “In contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people,” they say.

At first glance this seems somewhat counter-intuitive but on reflection it makes perfect sense. Kitsak and co point out that there are various scenarios in which well connected hubs have little influence over the spread of information. “For example, if a hub exists at the end of a branch at the periphery of a network, it will have a minimal impact in the spreading process through the core of the network.”

By contrast, “a less connected person who is strategically placed in the core of the network will have a significant effect that leads to dissemination through a large fraction of the population.”

In some ways though this sounds little like the maxim about being in the ‘right place, at the right time’. Certainly from my own experience this seems a worthwhile approach, rather than growing the number of connections in my social network. I suspect it may help if you (to use another saying) ‘keep your eyes and ears open’ to achieve this too!

Download: Identifying Influential Spreaders in Complex Networks (PDF; 3mb). Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1001.5285.

Many economists believe that investors make decisions rationally, weighing up corporate data and other pricing signals to evaluate gain or risk before buying or selling stocks.

[...]

As managers, we have a tendency to want things done the right way (aka our way) … we don’t like things happening around us we don’t understand and we definitely don’t like change.

It strikes me, that to be a successful 2.0 manager, you need to:

• know when to sit and watch
• know when to let things run their course and for how long
• know when to intervene (or engage) and how to do that without alienating everyone
• realise that management and control are not the same thing … relinquishing control can be a good management technique … and …
• be humble enough to accept that there may be more than one way to get things done and our way might not suit everyone’s needs.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Introduction
By John Brockman

Reporting on the recent Edge Master Class 08 in Sonoma, George Dyson wrote:

Retreating to the luxury of Sonoma to discuss economic theory in mid-2008 conveys images of Fiddling while Rome Burns. Do the architects of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Facebook have anything to teach the behavioral economists—and anything to learn? So what? What’s new?? As it turns out, all kinds of things are new.

“All kinds of things are new”, and something very big is in the air. According to Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster, Plaxo, and Facebook (as well as Facebook’s founding president) who was present in Sonoma. “If you’re not on Facebook, you don’t exist”.

Social software has arrived, and if you don’t pay attention and take onboard the developments at Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc., you are opting out of being a serious player in the realm of 21st Century ideas.

One of the more interesting contributions to the 2008 Edge World Question Center event was by Tim O’Reilly, the always-innovative guru, entrepreneur, publisher/evangelist of Web 2.0 social software revolution. In his piece (below), O’Reilly writes about his initial skepticism regarding Clay Shirky’s 2002 vision of “social software”. These comments are an infomative preamble to a recent talk in which Shirky coins the phrase “cognitive surplus”.

According to Shirky:

Starting after the second world war, a whole host of factors, like rising GDP, rising educational attainment, and rising life-span, forced the industrialized world to grapple with something new: free time. Lots and lots of free time. The amount of unstructured time among the educated population ballooned, accounting for billions of hours a year. And what did we do with that time? Mostly, we watched TV.

Society never really knows what do do with any surplus at first. (That’s what makes it a surplus.) In this case, we had to find something to do with the sudden spike in surplus hours. The sitcom was our gin, a ready-made response to the crisis of free time. TV has become a half-time job for most citizens of the industrialized world, at an average of 20 hours a week, every week, for decades.

Now, though, for the first time in its history, young people are watching less TV than their elders, and the cause of the decline is competition for their free time from media that allow for active and social participation, not just passive and individual consumption.

The value in media is no longer in sources but in flows; when we pool our cognitive surplus, it creates value that doesn’t exist when we operate in isolation. The displacement of TV watching is coming among people who are using more of their time to make things and do things, sometimes alone and sometimes together, and to share those things with others.

When Shirky first made this assertion at a tech conference, he was astonished to see the video of the speech rocket around the web faster and more broadly than anything else he had ever said or done.

Shirky believes that “we can take advantage of our cognitive surplus, but only if we start regarding pure consumption as an anomaly, and broad participation as the norm. This not a dispassionate argument, because the stakes are so high. We don’t get to decide whether we want a new society. The changes we are under can’t be rolled back, nor contained in the present institutional frameworks. What we might get to decide is how we want this change to turn out.”

“To call the current opportunity ‘once in a lifetime’”, he continues, “understates its enormity; the change in the social landscape is altering institutions that have been stable for generations, and making possible new kinds of human engagement that have never existed before. The results could be a marvel, or a catastrophe, depending on how seriously we try to shape what’s possible.”

If you want new, and original thinking, look no further.

Edge is pleased to present the video and transcript of Shirky’s talk below with the hope that an ensuing Reality Club discussion will further sharpen the argument.

— JB

CLAY SHIRKY is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology—how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. He is the author of Here Comes Everybody.

Clay Shirky’s Edge Bio page

TIM O’REILLY Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. I was skeptical of the term “social software”….In November 2002, Clay Shirky organized a “social software summit,” based on the premise that we were entering a “golden age of social software… greatly extending the ability of groups to self-organize.”I was skeptical of the term “social software” at the time. The explicit social software of the day, applications like friendster and meetup, were interesting, but didn’t seem likely to be the seed of the next big Silicon Valley revolution.I preferred to focus instead on the related ideas that I eventually formulated as “Web 2.0,” namely that the internet is displacing Microsoft Windows as the dominant software development platform, and that the competitive edge on that platform comes from aggregating the collective intelligence of everyone who uses the platform. The common thread that linked Google’s PageRank, ebay’s marketplace, Amazon’s user reviews, Wikipedia’s user-generated encyclopedia, and CraigsList’s self-service classified advertising seemed too broad a phenomenon to be successfully captured by the term “social software.” (This is also my complaint about the term “user generated content.”) By framing the phenomenon too narrowly, you can exclude the exemplars that help to understand its true nature. I was looking for a bigger metaphor, one that would tie together everything from open source software to the rise of web applications.You wouldn’t think to describe Google as social software, yet Google’s search results are profoundly shaped by its collective interactions with its users: every time someone makes a link on the web, Google follows that link to find the new site. It weights the value of the link based on a kind of implicit social graph (a link from site A is more authoritative than one from site B, based in part on the size and quality of the network that in turn references either A or B). When someone makes a search, they also benefit from the data Google has mined from the choices millions of other people have made when following links provided as the result of previous searches.You wouldn’t describe ebay or Craigslist or Wikipedia as social software either, yet each of them is the product of a passionate community, without which none of those sites would exist, and from which they draw their strength, like Antaeus touching mother earth. Photo sharing site Flickr or bookmark sharing site del.icio.us (both now owned by Yahoo!) also exploit the power of an internet community to build a collective work that is more valuable than could be provided by an individual contributor. But again, the social aspect is implicit — harnessed and applied, but never the featured act. Now, five years after Clay’s social software summit, Facebook, an application that explicitly explores the notion of the social network, has captured the imagination of those looking for the next internet frontier. I find myself ruefully remembering my skeptical comments to Clay after the summit, and wondering if he’s saying “I told you so.” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s young founder and CEO, woke up the industry when he began speaking of “the social graph” — that’s computer-science-speak for the mathematical structure that maps the relationships between people participating in Facebook — as the core of his platform. There is real power in thinking of today’s leading internet applications explicitly as social software. Mark’s insight that the opportunity is not just about building a “social networking site” but rather building a platform based on the social graph itself provides a lens through which to re-think countless other applications. Products like xobni (inbox spelled backwards) and MarkLogic’s MarkMail explore the social graph hidden in our email communications; Google and Yahoo! have both announced projects around this same idea. Google also acquired Jaiku, a pioneer in building a social-graph enabled address book for the phone. This is not to say that the idea of the social graph as the next big thing invalidates the other insights I was working with. Instead, it clarifies and expands them: Massive collections of data and the software that manipulates those collections, not software alone, are the heart of the next generation of applications. The social graph is only one instance of a class of data structure that will prove increasingly important as we build applications powered by data at internet scale. You can think of the mapping of people, businesses, and events to places as the “location graph”, or the relationship of search queries to results and advertisements as the “question-answer graph.” The graph exists outside of any particular application; multiple applications may explore and expose parts of it, gradually building a model of relationships that exist in the real world. As these various data graphs become the indispensable foundation of the next generation “internet operating system,” we face one of two outcomes: either the data will be shared by interoperable applications, or the company that first gets to a critical mass of useful data will become the supplier to other applications, and ultimately the master of that domain. So have I really changed my mind? As you can see, I’m incorporating “social software” into my own ongoing explanations of the future of computer applications. It’s curious to look back at the notes from that first Social Software summit. Many core insights are there, but the details are all wrong. Many of the projects and companies mentioned have disappeared, while the ideas have moved beyond that small group of 30 or so people, and in the process have become clearer and more focused, imperceptibly shifting from what we thought then to what we think now. Both Clay, who thought then that “social software” was a meaningful metaphor and I, who found it less useful then than I do today, have changed our minds. A concept is a frame, an organizing principle, a tool that helps us see. It seems to me that we all change our minds every day through the accretion of new facts, new ideas, new circumstances. We constantly retell the story of the past as seen through the lens of the present, and only sometimes are the changes profound enough to require a complete repudiation of what went before. Ideas themselves are perhaps the ultimate social software, evolving via the conversations we have with each other, the artifacts we create, and the stories we tell to explain them. Yes, if facts change our mind, that’s science. But when ideas change our minds, we see those facts afresh, and that’s history, culture, science, and philosophy all in one. TIM O’REILLY is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., one of the leading computer book publishers in the world. O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, and the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. O’Reilly’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar, “watches the alpha geeks”. Tom O’Reilly’s Edge Bio page

• Or if you prefer try the podcast from Clay Shirky’s talk at Demos in mid July, which is a good listen.

So it’s interesting that the ability to read ‘subtle signals’ is now being recognised as a science with the help of latest technology: “At the MIT Media Lab, Pentland leads a team of about a dozen researchers who have developed a range of small, wearable electronic devices that can easily and accurately gather the kinds of social data needed for such analyses. These devices track not just the physical location of the people who wear them, but also the finer details of a person’s movement— in effect, his or her body language — and several distinct features of his or her vocal behavior. And by taking note of people’s proximity to others and the patterns of their movement, the team can foster new insights into collective human behavior: the subtle differences between effective and ineffective teams, and the structures and incentives that either improve or block collaboration.”

OK, but poker players aren’t going to purchase the services of the MIT Media Lab, though you never know, maybe the Media Lab staff use their expertise to play poker? After all it’s not the first time academics have used their knowledge to beat the house, though that’s previously been using maths systems. Specifically, as it says in Wikipedia the MIT Blackjack Team, a group of students and ex-students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, and other leading colleges utilized card-counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at blackjack worldwide. The team and its successors operated from 1979 through the beginning of the 21st century.

That said what can the best poker players do to follow through on the need to “constantly learn, observe, and adapt”? If they wish to raise their game through greater perception of their opponent, not simply the maths of the cards, what is there available to help? Well I for one am interested as greater perception is one attribute I have worked hard to progress. Instead of emotional self-control I am more focused on ‘balance’, or staying cool, which is certainly required at the poker table. But what I have come across that reminds me of the need to learn, observe and adapt is the the theories of Colonel John Boyd:

Boyd hypothesized that all intelligent organisms and organizations undergo a continuous cycle of interaction with their environment. Boyd breaks this cycle down to four interrelated and overlapping processes through which one cycles continuously:

• Observation: the collection of data by means of the senses
• Orientation: the analysis and synthesis of data to form one’s current mental perspective
• Decision: the determination of a course of action based on one’s current mental perspective
• Action: the physical playing-out of decisions

Sound useful? If you are an elite poker player and want to know more read this blog post ‘OODA and you’: “These are ruthless times, ” it concludes.

Me riding a tank in 1994, smiling.

Stuart  G. Hall, m-power

A paper for presentation during the Ninth Annual International Conference of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences in Berkeley, California, July 23-26, 1999

Abstract: This paper is based on the believe that people have an intuitive ‘chaos’ understanding of the world in which they live. This understanding is comparable to non-linear science.  “The two productions of knowledge differ only in their argumentation premises, methodology, and consequently in their distinct manners – both valid – of reading the world.” (1)

Educationalist Paulo Freire found that by teaching illiterate people using a theory and action based on love, they learned to read and write by overcoming the cause – powerlessness. I have harnessed Freire’s approach in developing a non-linear science of empowerment based on people’s intuitive ‘chaos’ understanding. The aim is to help people to overcome their fears and lack of confidence.

Keywords: chaos, consciousness, empowerment, envionment, love, metaphor, non-linear science.

CONTACT INFORMATION: Stuart G. Hall, 12 Cross Rd, Leicester, UK LE2 3AA; Tel: 00 +44 (0)116 2707586.  e-mail: stuarth@dircon.co.uk  www.m-power.org.uk

Introduction

“The deepest error of modern biology is the entrenched belief that organisms interact only with other organisms and only adapt to their material environment. This is as wrong as believing that the people of a village interact with their neighbours but merely adapt to the material conditions of their cottages. In real life, both organisms and people change their environment as well as adapting to it.” (5)

In ideal terms people are equal to other organisms in the ability to change the environment. We are different from other organisms, from animals, by virtue of our consciousness. We are different from other people for the same basic reason. The problem is that the environment in which we live is organised according to need, not love. Consequently we can easily grow up in an environment colonised by contradictory values. For example Darwin in his ‘Descent of Man’ attempts to confront the contradicatory values of Victorian England by arguing that human evolution is based on love. (6)

All people have the ability to change their environment, but not equally. While ‘most people’ appear to simply adapt in order to survive, conversely: “The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better ‘fit’ for the world.” (5) Both have been colonised by the values of the powerful, argues Freire, utlising psychiatrist Franz Fanon’s observations of the effects of French colonisation in Algeria (6).

Understanding is Survival

The idea that there could be a people’s knowledge substantially equivalent to educated knowledge is acknowledged by Edwin Lazlo in terms of “the growing convergence between the mystical worldview (predominantly, but by no means exclusively Eastern) and the emerging paradigm of reality among scientists at the cutting edge of contemporary knowledge”. (7) It is rare to find anyone arguing this kind of equivalence in the West, and for good reason, the colonisation of consciousness by the values of need and knowledge has had longer to run: “European mathematics is mathematics: all other mathematics is anthropology. That explains why this other mathematics belongs to what has been called ethnoscience.” (19) Consequently people’s collective silence is correlated with stupidity, when it is first and foremost an adaptive response to an environment where people perceive they do not have a ‘voice’.

Labov makes this point in his study, The Logic of Nonstandard English in refuting educational psychologists who argued that Black speech patterns were unable of logically (logic=linear=standard) expressing abstract concepts. He examines a statement about the non-existence of heaven by a boy called Larry to illustrate his point:

Non-linear:

“’Cause you see. doesn’ nobody really know that it’s a God,

y’know, ‘cause I mean I have seen black gods, pink gods, white gods. all

color gods, and don’t nobody know it really a God. An’ when they be sayin’

if you good, you goin’ t’heaven, tha’s bullshit, ‘cause you ain’t goin’ to no

heaven, ‘cause it ain’t no heaven for you to go to.

Linear:

1 Everyone has a different idea of what God is like.

2 Therefore nobody really knows God exists.

3 If there is a heaven, it was made by God.

4 If God doesn’t exist he couldn’t have made heaven.

5 Therefore heaven doesn’t exist.

6 You can’t go to somewhere that doesn’t exist.

That is an example of non-linear understanding in expressing an abstract concept.  If you need more proof of people’s intuitive understanding of chaos, of its equivalence to knowledge, how about in survival? An example of what I’m trying to say is provided by a recent study of drug users from the late 1970’s New York, and their response to the emergence of a fatal new illness:

“In the period from 1976 to the early 1980’s, seroprevalence in New York rose from zero to about 50%…The epidemic then entered a period of dynamic stabilization…Although mathematical models have suggested network saturation may have been an important part of the stabilization process (Blower, 1991), the sociometric analysis of drug injectors’ networks conducted during the research for this volume suggest that the extent of network saturation may have been quite limited.

“Behaviour change probably made a major contribution to the stabilization of seroprevalence. In spite of a popular image that would suggest that either “slavery to their addiction” or “hedonistic, selfish personalities that ignore risks and social responsibility,” drug injectors in New York (and indeed, throughout the world) have acted both to protect themselves and others against the AIDS epidemic. Thus, by 1984, before there were any programs other than the mass media to inform them about AIDS or to help to protect themselves, drug injectors in New York were engaged in widespread risk reduction…Furthermore, observations on the street confirmed this by showing that drug dealers were competing with others for business by offering free sterile syringes along with their drugs as AIDS-prevention techniques.” (10)

Understanding unpredicatability is key to survival.  “Case study after case study of the human rather than the chemical level reveals our capacity – by no means 100% reliable, but to a higher degree than present chaos theory dictates – to predict the future in situations of extreme instability.” (11) 

Before the advent of meterology people’s understanding of the unpredicatbale behaviour of weather was key to the success of their harvest, and hence their survival. Fifty years ago a panel of US scientists was set up to examine the validity of 153 traditional weather sayings: “The panel found that at least 80 of them were sound. The early weather forecasters had come to the same conclusions about what they saw in the sky as have today’s experts with modern knowledge and scientific principles to help them.” (14)  Typically people’s understanding is expressed in metaphor – a powerful tool in simply communcating the principle that simple laws can result in complex results for example (15: schroder-quote in previous text):

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;

For want of a horse, the rider was lost; For want of a rider, the battle was lost;

For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost!”(Gleick)

Towards a working non-linear science of empowerment

Non-linear empowerment works by working with people’s understanding of chaos and change, often understood in spiral metaphor:  “The desert is not a circle. It is a spiral. When we have passed through the desert, nothing will be the same.” (18) In other words: “The psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change.” (19)

As an example of how non-linear empowerment  would work in practice I provide the following model I designed where the goal is to supporting consumer group leaders:

Non-linear empowerment for self- help/consumer-run services

1 Strengthen consumer group leaders by empowering them with greater self-confidence.

2 Support and strengthen consumer group leaders by enabling them to use those new found skills and confidence to help empower individuals greater self-confidence regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, age etc.

3 Promote greater individual participation in groups at all levels as a result of individual empowerment.

4 Enable groups to participate more widely in their communities, encouraging further individual self-empowerment with the support of group leaders.

5 Support efforts to change communities’ perceptions/actions regarding people with experience of mental distress, and in encouraging reflection on their own experience.

I believe Paulo Freire’s pedagogic model based on love is useful here, as he emphasises the  importance of ‘student’ and ‘teacher’ working on an equal level – despite their obvious differences in power. To paraphrase Freire, both must be ‘co-intentional’, as both are subjects in the task of unveiling reality (21).

—————————————————————————————————————-

References

(1) Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, chap 6. Or to put it in more intuitive language: “These peasants know more than we do.”.

(2) Lazlo, The Whispering Pond, Foreward. “Perhaps the most significant development in recent times… is the growing convergence between the mystical worldview (predominantly, but by no means exclusively Eastern) and the emerging paradigm of reality among scientists at the cutting edge of contemporary knowledge .”  For mystic I use the phrase intuitive chaos understanding – a phenomena hidden to most academics in the West because they have been educated to see the world along linear lines.  Not surprisingly therefore the orientation of current non-linear psychology is ‘top-down-linear’, as its aim is essentially improved control of the human environment, rather than to attempt to work with it.

3.  Hall, Chaos & Love: A non-linear model of empowerment in philosophy and action for self- help/consumer-run services/programs, workshop to be presented at the International Association of Psychosocial Rehabilitation Services Conference, Washington, May 2000.

Loye, Darwin’s Lost Theory: A New Grounding For The Chaos Revolution

Introduction

1. See ‘Chaos and Crime’, T.R.Young, in ‘Chaos, Criminology and Social Justice: The New Orderly (Dis)Order, Ed. by Dragan Milovanovic, 1997 for the inspiration for this distinction. (SPIS 364)

2. ‘A Way of life for Agnostics,’ James Lovelock, Gaia Circular, Summer 1999.

3. See Eric Fromm, ‘The Art of Loving’.

4. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Pedagogy of Hope.

5. ibid, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

6. Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

7. See my web site: www.m-power.org.uk for further proof. The web designer was my father, Dr Bob Hall.

People’s Knowledge

8. The Logic of Nonstandard English, William Labov: cited in Sociology: Themes and Perspectives: M.Haralambos/R.M.Heald.

9. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope.

10. Friedman SR, Curtis R, Neaigus A, Jose B, Des Jarlais DC, ‘Social Networks, Drug Injectors’ Lives, and HIV/AIDS,’ 1999. New York, Kluwer/Plenum.

11. James Gleick, ‘Chaos: Making a New Science.’

People’s knowledge of chaos: ‘It’s raining by planets’

12. Jonathan Wilshere, Leicestershire Weather Sayings, 1980.

13. Ibid.

14. Weather Wise, Reader’s Digest  publication, 1980. Folk sayings even recognise the dangers of correlation: “The moon and the weather may change together, But change of the moon does not change the weather,” in W.G.Willis Watson, ‘Calendar of Somerset Customs, Superstitions, Weather Lore & Popular Sayings’’, 1920.

17. Jonathan Wilshere, Leicestershire Weather Sayings, 1980.

Interaction between the two sets of chaos knowledge.

18. Ervin Laszlo, The Whispering Pond: A personal guide to the emerging vision of science. I include ‘people’s knowledge’ with the mystical, and in connecting it with Freire’s point about people’s knowledge contained in metaphor, it is worth citing Julien Green, “Suite Anglaise,’ 1972: “It is tempting to believe that mystics lack intellectual clarity, and that they easily confuse one thing with another. It is the symbolism they use which explains this mistaken view: a careful reading of the writings of the saints dealing with their visions, shows that once the transition is made from the tangible to the symbolic world, they never mix their images, but consistently adhere to the proportions they have chosen. Why is this? The answer is these images are the exact representation of the truth which they contemplate. In fact no-one is more precise than a mystic, and the mystic is not a dreamer.”

19. Thomas Crump, ‘The Anthropology of Numbers’, 1990.

20. Jurgen Habermas makes a call for an equal discourse in his philosophic writings. However, his idealistic approach fails to recognise the material & power differences between participants. CHECK.

21. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.